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Friday, 7 March 2008

Personalised flashcards

Flashcards have always been one of my favourite teaching tools and with the FaceinHole website I've found a place where I can quickly create my own personalised ones.

The site is easy to use. You just need either an image of yourself that you can upload or a webcam that you can take a picture with. Then you choose the picture you want to put yourself into and upload your image. With a bit of resizing and colour adjustment you can have a set of your own personal flashcards in just minutes.

Then you can either embed them in a webpage like these ones, have a link to them on the site or print them up to use them in class as flashcards.

How to use these with studentsThese kinds of flashcards can be used for a multitude of purposes.

They are great for generating stories / personal anecdotes ( The time I met Paris Hilton etc).

You can use them to practice a range of grammar structures. The ones below could all be used for 'used to' and students could either ask about the experience or you could make up anecdotes to tell them.

You could get your students to create their own flashcards using their own images and then come to class and tell the class about their imaginary experiences.

Often when students have to talk about their own experiences, they can't think of much to say. Hopefully these flashcards will stimulate their imagination and they can have fun making up stories and anecdotes.

You could even try to convince your students that some of these are true! (I actually used to have long hair and go dancing with Paris Hilton!)

Here are my 'used to' experiences.

I used to play football for Manchester united

I used to go dancing with Paris Hilton.

I used to be a stunt man.

I used to have long hair.

I used to be a bit of an ogre.

I used to play in a band.

What I liked about it

Lots of different pictures to choose from

Quick and easy to create the flashcards

Lots of fun for free and registration necessary

What I wasn't so sure about

Would be nice to have some more ordinary images and perhaps different places around the world.

It only worked with jpg images, not with gif

Watch out. Some of them are less suitable for younger learners

There's so much you can do with good images and personalised ones can be even more stimulating. I hope you find this useful and you get your students creating and talking about some great images.http://www.faceinhole.com

2 comments:

Thanks for the tip, NIk. I´ve been teaching "used to" to my students and have used faceinhole to make a ppt presentation with personalized pictures too. I´ll let you know what my students think of it later.I had a great time laughing at my image in different situations.

I´d like to suggest a site for you to have a look. It follows the same idea of working with images but this one you can blend your own image with different possibilities (Modigliani style, oriental, african and so on)http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/transformer/

This was my trialhttp://lifefeast.blogspot.com/2007/12/working-with-photos.html

I haven't had time to look at the Morph site yet, but I had a look over at your blog. I really enjoyed your working with photos posting and my daughter and I both had a go at the Simpsonise site and created Nik and Molly Simpson. Loads of fun thanks for that. I think I might have a few teaching ideas for it when I get a min.